


Irreparable

by thedevilchicken



Category: The Expendables (Movies)
Genre: Backstory, Canon-Typical Violence, Drinking, Drug Abuse, Dysfunctional Relationships, First Meetings, First Time, Hopeful Ending, M/M, Mid-Canon, Missions, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-21
Updated: 2015-08-21
Packaged: 2018-04-16 11:25:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4623540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gunner's made mistakes. But so has Barney, and he needs to set them right.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Irreparable

**Author's Note:**

  * For [galerian_ash](https://archiveofourown.org/users/galerian_ash/gifts).



> AO3 seems to be using "Gunnar" as the official spelling; the movie itself uses "Gunner" so I've gone with that.

When Barney first met him, Gunner was a 23-year-old chemical engineering PhD student at MIT in an on-again off-again relationship with a massive Icelandic mathematician called Hafthor. The Icelander was _huge_ , had about five inches and at least seventy pounds even on Gunner and made both him and Barney look like someone’s kid brother. Barney only met him once but it was enough to make him want to run forthwith to the nearest gym and pump till he passed out. Not useful since Hafthor was the one he’d been there to meet.

Hafthor lifted weights and Gunner did karate. He met them on the way out of the gym one day, in the rain under a huge golf umbrella with Napoleon introducing them because even then he’d had feelers out all over the place, seeking out new talent, and Barney was looking for a guy with a brain in his head who could handle himself in a fight for one short little job. Hafthor had dropped out of some sort of military academy to head across the Atlantic to MIT but it took Barney about twelve seconds in his company to know he wasn’t the guy he wanted; he made polite excuses then caught Gunner the next day on his way to the lab. It was still raining so the conversation was quick.

“Just one job,” Barney said. 

“Not interested,” Gunner replied. 

“It’ll pay your tuition. All of it.”

That was what swayed him. They did the job, a quick one, just the two of them heading down to Mexico after a couple of sessions at the shooting range, Barney teaching Gunner which end of the gun pointed out. They got back home three days later and Barney touched the plane down back in Massachusetts. They’d known each other less than a week and Gunner had already killed two people, been spattered with their blood; he tried to laugh it off but he broke down and fucking _bawled_ when they got back to his apartment, and Barney thought better of just leaving him there. 

Barney stayed a week in the end, stuffed him full of home-cooked Italian food just his own mom had used to do when he was down, dragged him down to the gym because he thought maybe beating the shit out of something might help and maybe it did, for a couple of hours. Gunner was quick for a tall guy, especially for a tall guy as built as he was, even if Barney had enough experience under his belt to keep up. He’d been a boxer back in the academy, after all, and his special forces training had been pretty thorough, and even though he’d left the military behind he was still using all that shit pretty often. Gunner seemed surprised when he dumped him on his back and knocked all the wind out of him, but he got back up and gave him a real knock-down fight.

Gunner seemed better after that, at least until after they’d gotten back into his apartment from the cheap steakhouse where they ate after the gym, then he sagged back into surly and withdrawn. Barney slapped him straight across the face, standing in front of him as he sat there maudlin on the couch, and Gunner’s eyes flashed angry but just for a second and then he just looked completely and utterly aghast. Barney hauled him up off the couch by the front of his shirt. Gunner met his gaze. And then Gunner kissed him, hard and desperate. 

He should’ve stopped it but he didn’t. He didn’t question it till later but when he did he guessed he hadn’t stopped it because he felt some kind of guilt: he’d been the one who’d taken Gunner out there, after all, put a gun in his hand and made him a killer. But right then what he did instead of any of the sensible options was lean up, press up on his toes to get close to Gunner’s height, and he kissed him back like he was fucking starved for it. 

They wound up in bed, in Gunner’s bed, where height difference mattered less when Gunner was on his knees. Barney fucked him slow and hard and breathless till they were hot and sweaty, and not just because it was the middle of July and apparently Gunner hadn’t heard of fans. Gunner moaned and Barney groaned and it occurred to him sometime after they’d both finally finished that he hadn’t fucked a guy since the academy something like fifteen years ago. They went to sleep in a damp spot and Gunner snored and Barney threw one arm over Gunner’s waist. 

He had a feeling Gunner Jensen was going to come back to haunt him. 

-

They met again six years later, in the middle of Guatemala in a rainstorm. 

Gunner was with a team by then, trained up and toting a sniper rifle; Barney had heard he’d quit MIT and worked as a bouncer for a while, chasing some girl he never got in the end, though Barney guessed given what he knew he had some reservations about Gunner’s new career. The teams ran into each other in the hills, soaked to the skin and muddy up to the ankles, pissed off and apparently there on the same damn job like they were each other’s failsafe. All they could do was sling up a few camouflage-print tarps and try to wait it out before they finally went in and Barney wound up sitting on a fallen tree trunk under his canvas tarp with Gunner. 

They didn’t talk. Gunner kept glancing at him, though, sidelong, unsubtle, and Barney kept trying to ignore it though they were sitting so close, wet shoulders pressed together, that it was pretty hard to ignore. His blonde hair looked dark soaked with rain and plastered to his scalp the way it was, made him look different but he was still the same, still the belligerent son of a bitch with the niggling complex tucked away in the back of his head that Barney had known back in Cambridge before he’d left him there and gone back home. He was still the same even when he wrapped his fingers around Barney’s wrist and held on tight and Barney didn’t tell him to stop, didn’t push him away. He probably should have but he couldn’t. He didn’t want to.

The two teams worked together when the rain let up and Gunner went up a tree near the perimeter while the others went in over the walls with so many grappling hooks Barney had to wonder if it was going out of style. Barney and the other team’s leader apparently decided somewhere along the way that it’d burn too many bridges and the merc world was too damn small to try to screw each other over so they split the hostages, took one each and Barney heard a pop of gunfire over his shoulder as he was dragging their guy out through the rain-flooded courtyard. A guy with a gun in hand dropped into the rainwater with a splash and Barney gave a quick mock-salute up at Gunner in his perch. He had a feeling it wouldn’t be the last time the big Swede saved his life. 

They traded the hostages to the CIA for cash and the teams both skipped over into Mexico, took up rooms in cheap hotels by a beach somewhere on the Pacific for a couple of nights like that was a good idea at all. Barney sat himself down in a bar and ordered a tequila in rusty Spanish, chased it with a beer while Gunner came in through the door and sat himself down across the table. He looked like some huge, hulking beach bum in shorts and flip-flops with a thin shirt hanging half-open over his chest, sunglasses still pushed up on his head though it was well past sunset. It was a hell of an outfit to have put together in the three hours they’d been there and it did pretty much nothing to hide the fact he was carrying a butterfly knife in one pocket with his wallet. Barney suspected he knew how to use it and probably had.

“Hey, Barney,” Gunner said. 

“Hey, Gunner.”

And that was the extent of their conversation. Barney bought Gunner a beer and they drank in silence then they went outside, took a walk down the beach under the not quite full moon, Barney’s boots in his hands, getting colder in the breeze till they turned back and wound up in Gunner’s hotel room. Barney had almost expected it to happen. 

What he didn’t expect was Gunner’s mouth on his cock and his hands in Gunner’s hair, the way Gunner bent over the dresser up against the wall and let Barney fuck him half-clothed in the dark till neither of them could keep quiet. He didn’t expect to stay the night after, getting naked and stretching out under the lopsided ceiling fan, listening to Gunner breathe. 

He left before dawn. It seemed like the thing to do.

-

The name of the other team’s leader was Conrad Stonebanks. 

Barney had breakfast with him the next morning and they discussed business with an ocean view over coffee. They’d served together years before and never really lost touch completely after that - people in their line of work weren’t exactly numerous so they were pretty much either good or dead, known or dead - but they put together a team merger, said they’d call themselves the Expendables and that amused them both, considering the way their military careers had ended. They’d not exactly covering themselves in glory. There was a reason they were mercenaries, after all.

Gunner left and went back to Europe. They picked him up a few times over the years, pulled him in on jobs that needed a local or a sniper or a local sniper and Barney watched him drinking from a flask in the inside pocket of his flak vest sometimes, when he thought no one was watching back in the beginning then he was doing it openly in a few years’ time and the guys were all pretty sure he was nuts. Barney kept him close when they were out on jobs, telling himself Gunner would be fine if he just nudged him back in the right direction every now and then. For a while, he was. And then he wasn’t.

Barney watched him get older year by year, watched his reaction times dip just a fraction, watched himself going the same way and hell, he was a full decade older than Gunner so maybe he had it worse. They hooked up in hotel rooms after the job was done, once did it in a jeep in the middle of a job like there was any sense in that, slept in the same bed every now and then and it was easy even if it brought all the old guilt back each and every time Barney saw him. Barney sucked Gunner’s cock and made his back arch till he pulled something. Gunner laughed as Barney had to lean up to bite his jaw.

After the end with Stonebanks, everything got fucked up and fucked up and then worse. For six months, seven, Barney didn’t even have a team, wasn’t sure he could face it, wasn’t sure that he wanted to, beat the shit out of punching bags and drank too much sometimes, got into fist fights in bars and had to remind himself not to go too far because his revolver was sitting in the glove box and it wasn’t like shooting Stonebanks with it had made him forget how it worked. There was a line he knew it’d be easy to cross but every now and then he started to lose sight of it.

Then Napoleon called and said something about Gunner. And, like an idiot, the first thing Barney did was fly straight out to Europe. 

It wasn’t like he’d planned to visit Sweden in winter because the rain was fucking freezing when he landed and by the time he found Gunner’s apartment he felt like frostbite was setting in. It wasn’t like he wanted to see Gunner because over the years he’d tried, he’d _really_ tried with him, had people point him to AA or tried to keep him occupied with solo side jobs the main crew couldn’t take, but nothing had stuck and when Barney got there, forced the apartment door because no one was answering, there was Gunner sprawled on the couch so high on fucking meth that he couldn’t stand without Barney taking half his weight. And with a guy Gunner’s size, half his weight was far from inconsiderable.

He got him into bed, closed the blinds, made him drink a pint of water though he threw it up in a mop bucket thirty seconds later. Gunner looked at him bleary-eyed for a second and then turned onto his stomach, pressed his face into the pillow. 

“Hey, Barney,” he murmured, muffled, so out of it he could barely get the words out and frankly Barney was amazed he even knew he was there, let alone knew who he was. 

“Hey, Gunner,” he replied, and stretched out next to him, turned onto his side and rested one arm over Gunner’s back. He looked like hell, smelled like hell and so did the apartment, but he’d get him back on track. He could do that, at least.

“Get some sleep. We’ve got some shit to talk about.”

-

He offered him a job. 

It was maybe the single worst idea Barney had ever had in his life, not even second to trusting Conrad Stonebanks, but he went ahead and did it anyway. He stripped Gunner naked and shoved him into the shower and made him scrub while he flushed the rest of his meth down the kitchen sink with what was left of his vodka. He shovelled all the superfluous crap out of the refrigerator into the trash and packed Gunner’s bag and they left on the next flight out to the States, Gunner looking like hell as he dozed fitfully in business class with his hand around Barney’s wrist, neither of them giving a damn who saw. And Barney took him to his place once they landed, made him eat a bowl of soup and take another shower before he’d let him get into bed and go back to sleep. 

Gunner stayed for three weeks and Barney turned down three jobs and in the end Barney stopped even caring one bit that he kept waking up to the sound of a big blonde Swede snoring like an airplane engine. It didn’t bother him when all Gunner’s clothes wound up in the laundry with his and Gunner started wearing his t-shirts and sweatpants though the ankles came up several inches short. It didn’t bother him when Gunner left towels on the bathroom floor but maybe that was because he started casually smothering him with them each and every time till he remembered to hang them up or put them in the laundry. 

He didn’t care when he’d wake up sometime before dawn and Gunner would be wide awake and looking at him; he just shoved him down and kissed him and then Gunner’s hands were everywhere and somehow sex was the easiest thing they had. 

“It’s got an A in it, you know,” Gunner said, looking over his new dog tags. “My name. Gunn _ar_ , not Gunn _er_. It’s Swedish.”

“Yeah, I know,” Barney said. “Think of it like a nickname. Gunnar the Gunner.”

Gunner shook his head but he smiled while he clearly thought Barney couldn’t see and put the tags on anyway, looping them around his neck and tucking them into his shirt; Barney just felt like shit for making him do it but there was nothing, _nothing_ else he could think of to do. All he could offer him to keep his brain off of drugs was work. That was all Barney had.

Lee Christmas was the first new guy he hired but the rest weren’t far behind, guys he’d worked with over the years, guys who for one reason or another just hadn’t wound up in the team before. They all got together back in the States and they went out on their very first job, did a second not long after that, did a third and then a fourth and then the next thing was tattoos because apparently a team wasn’t a team without the team tat. Tool did them all in his studio and Gunner looked up at Barney as he got his inked in on his bicep. He looked grateful, even if he didn’t say it, though Barney wasn’t sure what he had to be grateful for. Hell, the rest of the team all thought Gunner Jensen was a joke. 

Barney, though: Barney never thought that. He was almost glad he had the meth to blame when Gunner finally bugged out because he guessed if he hadn’t it would’ve been just like another Stonebanks. Christmas and the guys didn’t see the scale of the betrayal was the same, didn’t see how when Barney fired him he did it for Gunner and not the team like maybe he’d go away and pull himself together this time, at last. They just saw some crazy old meth-head who’d gotten too old and too fucked up to do the job.

Maybe, Barney thought, it would’ve been worse than Stonebanks. After all, he’d seen it coming with Gunner; he just hadn’t done enough to stop it. 

-

Time passed; shit got old and so did they and then they brought in the new kids with their new tattoos and that worked somehow, like it rejuvenated all of them, a semi-competitive breath of fresh air. Barney enjoyed his work. Gunner enjoyed his maybe a little too much. 

Sometimes Barney would get home after a job or he’d just get home from a couple of hours at the gym and Gunner would be on his couch, drinking his beer. Barney would join him and they’d sit together, put the TV on or leave it off, put on some music or leave it off, sit there in silence most of the time but that wasn’t uncomfortable, that was just how it went when Gunner was there. They weren’t talkative. Barney guessed they didn’t need to be.

Sometimes they went to bed after, late at night, and sometimes Gunner would smile that weird little smile that looked out of place on him somehow because he spent so much time scowling. Sometimes all they did was sleep and that was fine because Barney had long since bought himself a new bed, one where Gunner’s feet didn’t stick out over the end because the guy was apparently some kind of a Nordic giant, and sometimes they fooled around, sometimes Gunner got on top and pinned Barney’s wrists above his head and _smiled_. He’d gotten old or at least gotten older but sometimes when he smiled it was like he was that 23-year-old again, playing tough guy to spite his boyfriend though what that said about Barney he wasn’t sure. He’d known that guy that Gunner had been for less than a week before he’d gotten tucked away in the back of Gunner’s head like a dream he had once that he couldn’t quite remember.

“He’s a liability,” Christmas said, not even trying to be quiet about it, two jobs after Barney had killed Stonebanks dead for the second time, once they’d landed the plane back home. Barney knew what Christmas meant and he valued his opinion, he’d been trying to mend bridges with him since the whole dumbass affair over in Azmenistan, but there was no way he could agree. This was the one hill their friendship would die on if it needed to, though he hoped it wouldn’t need to. He loved the antagonistic Brit like a brother, cautious as he tried to be.

“He’s fine,” Barney said. “I’ll take care of him.” And Christmas shrugged but he let it go. It was all about trust, and Lee trusted him.

Christmas didn’t get why he kept Gunner around. Maybe he thought it was some kind of team loyalty and he should’ve been able to get that because it wasn’t like Christmas wasn’t loyal - he was pretty much the best friend Barney had had in his life if he exed out Stonebanks and the shit that had followed. Maybe he thought he felt some kind of responsibility toward him and Barney guessed that was true because Gunner was his fault. He’d started it. He’d done this to him, fucked him up irreparably. But there’d been something else tugging there for years, underneath, that he didn’t like to inspect.

It was raining when he got back to his place and when he saw Gunner it was like the weather made sense somehow if not the fact he was sat there on the wall outside the building, legs swinging, heels scuffing the sidewalk, soaked. Barney turned up the collar of his coat and got out into the downpour, slammed the door and made Gunner’s head snap over in his direction. 

“What the fuck are you doing?” Barney asked. 

“Waiting for you,” Gunner said, like that was somehow obvious. He smiled, a little bitter with it. “Waiting for you to _take care of me_.”

Barney sighed, getting wetter by the second, rain trickling down under the collar of his coat. Of course he’d heard. He’d expected him to, just hadn’t expected a confrontation.

“I’m not an idiot, Barney,” Gunner continued. “I know you feel responsible. I know that’s why you’re doing what you’re doing but Jesus, I knew what I was signing up for. You made it clear.” He came down from the wall, pulled himself up tall like he meant it, like he meant to be everything he could be, strong or intimidating or whatever shit it was that Barney saw straight through and always had. “I _like_ the work. Do I look like I need your help?”

“Yeah,” Barney said, “sometimes you do.” And he frowned, swiping back his soaked-through hair, rubbing his eyes clear so he could force his gaze to Gunner’s because fuck, this was it, this was the moment, all or nothing. 

He’d pulled Gunner back, brought him back out of some meth-addled haze in a dank apartment somewhere in Stockholm and given him a life again, set him on course the best way he knew how. But it was doing that that’d brought Barney back, too, after Stonebanks and all of that shit, when lines looked blurred, when there was no one left in the world but the two of them. Gunner had needed his help so he’d pulled himself together and he’d given it. Gunner was always saving his life.

Barney’s heart hammered. “Sometimes you need my help,” he said. “But maybe I need yours, too.”

Gunner took a moment to think that through and then all the false bravado washed away with the rain. 

Gunner stepped in, did it quickly like he wanted to get it done before Barney could change his mind, pulled him in by his coat and the back of his neck and they kissed, fuck the location, fuck the cars driving by, fuck everything and everyone because Barney’s fingers went into Gunner’s hair and Gunner’s went into his and it was like they couldn’t get close enough, couldn’t kiss hard enough, like years of remorse meant nothing in an instant because fuck, Barney needed this every inch as much as Gunner did. He had right from the start. The life they lived could take everything if they let it, strip everything away till the best they could hope for was an unmarked grave and that maybe someone out there might remember them fondly. Barney needed more than fond remembrance. Gunner had been giving him more than that for years.

They got inside, shivering, dripping rainwater on all the floors and rugs and slipping in it as they went till they were behind Barney’s door and they pulled at each other’s disastrous clothing, kicking off boots, Gunner impatient and popping buttons from Barney’s shirt with a yank that sent them all skittering across the living room floor. Barney’s hair was still dripping water into his eyes as Gunner’s fingers circled his wrists and tugged him into the bedroom, their skin still wet as Barney slicked himself and pushed inside him, hard. It didn’t need to be gentle, they weren’t fooling themselves about that; it didn’t need to last long, they just needed it to happen, Barney’s pulse racing and his breath coming quick. He came with a shout and brought Gunner off with his hand after that, still pushed up inside him. There was no need for exploration; he already knew every inch of him.

It was still raining outside when they washed up in the bathroom, naked under stark white lights that made every line in their faces stand out like canyons. But Gunner didn’t seem to care about that, just stepped up behind him at the sink and wrapped his arms around him from behind; it wasn’t quite tentative but he caught Barney’s eye in the mirror, looking over Barney’s shoulder with a faint smile tugging at his mouth that said some approval there wouldn’t be a bad thing. Barney leaned back against him, leaned into him with a small smile of his own. He’d never had that before. He’d never not been the strong one; maybe they could share it.

“Why do you do that?” Barney asked, as Gunner’s fingers went around his wrists. 

“Checking you’re still alive, old man,” Gunner said, ducking his mouth into the crook of Barney’s neck. “I can take your pulse here instead if you like.” He pressed his fingers to the other side of Barney’s neck, straight over his carotid like he knew just where to aim for. “Maybe here.” He slipped his hand down Barney’s arm, pressed fingers to his brachial artery inside his elbow. “Here?” Fingers went down over Barney’s abdomen, found the femoral artery by his groin and Barney chuckled under his breath but he let him leave his hand there.

“I’m not dead yet,” he said. “Neither are you. Don’t go getting yourself killed to prove me wrong.”

They put on Barney’s clothes after that, socks and underwear and t-shirts, Gunnar in sweats that were nowhere near long enough and reminded Barney of another time as they drank beers on the couch watching a football game neither of them cared about. Gunner nodded off into a loud fit of snoring and Barney nudged him awake again with his elbow then dragged him back to bed. 

It was still raining outside when they turned off the lights and stretched out together, drops drumming on the window, thunder rolling somewhere miles away. And maybe it would all work out and maybe it wouldn’t but at least Barney had figured out that maybe he had something to offer Gunner after all. 

Gunner needed him, that much was clear, and he’d needed him for years; maybe he needed Gunner, and maybe that was enough for both of them. 

In the end, they were just as broken as each other. It seemed like a fair trade.


End file.
